The Mother and the Whore
What begins as idle drifting through conversations and beds slowly reveals itself as something far more severe. Time stretches, words pile up, and desire is talked to death rather than felt. The film refuses momentum, trapping its characters in their own voices, until speech becomes a form of paralysis. When The Mother and the Whore finally takes shape, it feels less like a love story than a reckoning with emotional cowardice, with post-’68 freedom curdling into endless self-justification. Jean Eustache exposes intimacy as performance and confession as cruelty, leaving behind not romance or rebellion, but a raw portrait of people terrified of choosing, and even more terrified of being alone.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Nia DaCosta was faced with the difficult task of following Danny Boyle as director in this post-apocalyptic universe, and it’s a challenge she successfully rises to. Balancing humor, humanity, and horror can sometimes be tricky, yet everything works remarkably well in The Bone Temple. The film feels less like a survival story and more like a meditation on humanity itself. Perhaps we’ve seen something like this before, but Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell bring a kind of pure, death-metal craziness that elevates the whole experience.
The zombies are almost entirely irrelevant and kept to a minimum. The Bone Temple stands as one of the best entries in the franchise for this very reason: the usual, slightly dull mechanics of zombieism are deliberately de-emphasized. What truly matters here is the conflict between sentient human beings. Even the one important zombie is compelling, precisely because it is being transformed into something else. This is an exciting, direct, and energized—though extremely gruesome—film, driven by genuine human conflict and real jeopardy. In the end, non-zombies are far more cinematic.
